Puppet Master: Axis of Evil is set during the war years, USA. A young teenage guy called Danny Coogan is working in the hotel where the old magician Toulon killed himself. He manages to find Toulon's collection of dolls and takes them back with him to his home in LA's Chinatown. Now as fate would have it, it turns out the Nazi agents who pressed Toulon to kill himself are both working undercover in LA also. Danny, twigging that something bad is underfoot, goes looking for answers and finds more than he can deal with, but with the puppets to his aid, things may just work out fine... Or will they?

I've had a special fondness for the Puppet Master flicks, ever since i was a young lad. Now even though the latter movies quite frankly have been guff, the originals (esp 1 and 2) are in my opinion genre classics. Now are we going to see Axis of Evil come close to that goodness? Well... No is answer. Quite frankly that doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me however is just how 'light' this movie is. There really is very little meat to it. It's not scary, it's not gory, it's not that much fun and the storyline and characters are really quite boring.

Having said that, the acting quality is perfectly solid, nothing remarkable but generally passable. The majority of performances are convincing and everybody seems cast well for their respective characters. No complaints in this regard. The special effects whilst certainly minimal are respectable enough. The ninja puppet is pretty cool although i can't help but feel he should have been doing more, IE: ninja kicking Nazi ankles, etc. The action is too stale but then this is an argument that could be levelled at the movie as a whole.

This movie isn't scary, creepy or anything, in fact I'd be tough to call this a horror movie in any regard. This is very little gore, almost nothing and what is there is just lame. So is AoE worth watching? Really I'd say skip it. The only people who will find an appreciation for this movie are Puppet Master aficionados and even then they'd need to be pretty hardcore. Everybody else is better off watching Sesame St... It's creepier.

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